The
“Logos Echo” of Unity in the Universe

The unity of consciousness is its most
salient characteristic. Brain science shows us that many different areas of the
brain are involved in behavior and experience (see Kandel and Schwartz, 1985). Verbally,
we can describe any aspect of an experience from the smallest geometrical
feature all the way up to the overall themes through time, even though these
things are mediated by different brain areas. One way of understanding and
accounting for this in light of the contrary evidence of brain science, and the
science of the world that says everything is separate, is to say that unity is
an underlying principle of the entire universe—from the wider
space-time universe and its matter, to brains, to language. The binding problem
is far from simply being a problem of just the brain and mind. This unity is
something that touches upon all of our knowledge of how the world works, and
could provide a simple explanation of why everything exists and
works as it does. Natural laws have symmetry, and an atom of gold in one
location behaves like an atom of gold in another location. I think this fact,
along with many others in a similar vein (see Weyl, 1952), shows that these
atoms are facets of the same thing. A great unity is woven throughout all
aspects of the universe. We cannot see it directly, just as we cannot see
consciousness when we look at a brain. We can find lots of evidence for this
organizational unity by comparing the general organizational principles of
language, brains, and the universe.

Physicists search for the ultimate
particle or string that ultimately constitutes the one basic building block of
reality. Astrophysicists say that the universe arose from a
singularity—essentially an absolute unity. Gravity is like a symbol of this
unity. The unity in the common origin of life, their parallel carbon-based DNA,
and basic cellular structures, all echo the parallel unity of the common origin
of the matter of the universe and the common features and laws found
everywhere. Stars, and the planets that orbit them, are another unity as
central symbol. The sun gives light and life to the earth, and all our
large molecules were made within a previous sun’s sphere—a sun that exploded
(like the big bang again—within the original sphere of which all natural law
and space-time was made). It becomes apparent when we attend to the repeating
themes of reality that everything in the universe is actually a facet of the
same thing--One thing woven into and behind all things. The mirror of the forms
of matter and its processes, the ability of brains to comprehend, and the
possibility of a meaningful language, all arise from this essential unity
beyond time and space. Coherence is a property of the entire universe, and our
brains arose as an echo of this.

We are here because a bubble formed in
that unity—a self-reflective “hall of mirrors” where patterns repeat because of
the underlying unity that everything has its roots in like all
plants have roots in the sphere of the Earth, or like certain old California
cedars share roots. The original unity did not cease to exist at
the big bang, but rather spread out to become immanent everywhere—to provide
the basis for the coherence in reality. Forms echo in this unity through time
and space like a rock dropped in a calm pond causes rings of concentric waves
to move out from the mass dropped in the center. The original bubble of the big
bang—that tiny sphere—had infinite connectivity and unity along with infinite
possibility. This was the first spreading out and distribution of ultimate
unity. The natural laws we know congealed out of this mini “everything”
computer—this ultimately connected node of mechanical meaning that all
subsequent events in the universe get their coherence and basic physical form
from. These repeating patterns are the most basic aspect of existence.

Future life and consciousness—which nudges
probabilities and transcends space-time--selected the forms of these laws and
constants of nature and all its particles. In an echo of this, Every cell in
our body contains a set of DNA that is exactly alike, and originally starts
from one cell—a unity. The DNA—selected by certain forces in evolution such as
a tendency toward meaning/consciousness—is a set of instructions that gets
distributed to every cell in the growing organism. Distributed just like
natural law in the universe from the original “bubble” of space-time. A whole
new person can be cloned from the DNA of one of these single cells—all of the
information for a whole organism is contained in each cell everywhere in the
body hologram-like. The echo of the original unity is written in every cell,
just like in the symmetry and salience of natural law echos, and is informed
by, the original unity in the universe. We say children have “potential”, and
choose the right path—ostensibly to find a MEANINGFUL life. All these
threads running through our lives—right down to the fact that literary devices
like allegory and metaphor exist—arise because of the inherent unity behind the
space-time reality we find ourselves embedded in, and the consequent echo of
forms. In the echo, we see that time and space are an illusory canvas upon
which the meaning of unity is written in the colorful language of reality.
Reality is fundamentally language-like. The coherence and comprehensibility of
that language is evidence of the basic nature of consciousness in relation to
existence.

I call this pattern of patterns, or
metapattern, the “logos echo”—after the “Logos” or divine writing
of the universe of the ancient Greeks. Since time and space were created
along with the universe, at some level and in some “place” beyond time and
space, everything exists as one—shares it’s nature. It must be in this place
that the essence of our consciousness originates. A computer screen has no
meaning, no coherence, no unity, without a consciousness peering at it, binding
it together. The most defining feature of consciousness is that it transcends
time and space to bring things together—whether in the brain tissue, in the
universe we see, or in our written language and art. The deeper you look into
this view, the more interesting relationships you find. The very essence of
vision is that we see things always back in time--because light takes time to
reach our eyes—yet our bodies always need to travel towards things we see,
which are therefore in the future for us, because it takes time to move toward
them. We move towards these things as a result of what we see in the “past” in
our vision. This situation of vision echoes almost precisely in general form
the nature of our memory in relation to our behaviors. All prediction is based
on these types of principles, and none of them would work (there would be no
coherence) without the logos echo. Everything about consciousness is time and
space transcending, and this principle does not stop at the limit of our
biological brains. We have memory which knits together events of the past, we
make plans, we find meaning—all of it dependent on the logos echo created by
inherent unity. We remember themes and general things easier than specifics,
perhaps through the logos echo property of the universe. The best way to
remember specifics is to embed them in a larger meaning. Much of our learning
is (or should be) based on analogy and metaphor—because new things generally
follow similar patterns to old things. Trying to explain consciousness using
this or that portion of the distributed space-time universe will not work by
itself. The explanations will always be incomplete—like Godels theorem in
mathematics, or the inaccuracies of metaphor or analogy when you focus on
detail, or the “messiness” of woven-together forms compared to Platonic ideals.

When it comes to investigating
consciousness, we can make an analogy to a dreamer. The details are like the
dreamers particular personal experiences, while the grand themes behind them
are the real focus of scrutiny for investigators, and interpreters. Actual
dreams have more to do with metaphors and meaning pulled out of imagination/infinite
possibility of the dreamer, loosely following the constraints laid down by
memories, and particulars from the day, etc. Natural science is the
opposite—focusing on single variables, not metaphorical themes. Unity and
meaning is what is lacking in science—and it is a real priciple of the
universe, not just a device of poets. Consciousness is the unity going back
toward infinite possibility--constrained by, and reflected in, cosmic,
biological, and liguistic evolution. If you carry anthropic cosmological ideas
to their logical conclusion, all of reality is the stable dream of a higher
consciousness beyond, and immanent in, space-time. It is the type of dream that
gives rise to the dreamer himself. The ultimate consciousness. Our linear-causality
view of the world is basically one-sided and survival oriented. Time does not
flow, it separates. It is a collapse of infinite possibility into finite forms.
What flows “back” in time is the forms that become higher consciousness
later—like the progressive rise and fall of civilizations leading up to the
greatest civilization. In cosmology, astrophysicists search for evidence of
whether the universe is “closed”—meaning that gravity will overcome the outward
expansion of the universe to collapse it to a point again. I am saying that the
universe is open, but that a “ghost” of a collapse into a point, an ultimate
consciousness, IS the closure and purpose of the universe. The backward-in-time
origin of the creation explosion itself—which in this view would be the
ultimate overriding echo in the universe, and the big bang was just a literary
device, and a foreshadowing from the human viewpoint. The consciousness that
arises will be so complete and intense that it will essentially be the same
thing as the creation from infinite possibility in the new universe—the
ultimate uroboros, which literally created itself. Existence has portents, just
like foreshadowing as a literary device. A dream that starts more like a
senseless computer, but ends more like a lucid dream when consciousness of it
all arises. Many predictions should be able to be made from these theories. For
example, full consciousness should be able to change things back in time, as it
has been doing from its place already. We necessarily would not see these
things until our own consciousness developed beyond its biological and
linear-causal constraints—aided and nurtured both by our large brains and our
“information society”. In other words, if our consciousness is small we would
not be able to see the large things or large themes at work in the universe.

There are many analogies for this unity in
our experience which serve as evidence for a real principle of our
universe—such as the repeating cragginess of a fractal coastline, or an ant
hill compared to a human community. We know what “free as a bird” means because
the logos echo principle in our brains allows the transfer of the essential
unity of that metaphor. This type of transcending unity is the source of all
meaning. This is a principle of something unseen, and intangible, that we
surmise is there by the order of what we can see with our biologically limited
viewpoint. Without this principle of logos echo from this unity, our brains,
our universe, our language, and our consciousness could not exist. An unseen
principle does not get more real than that. The logos echo is the most basic
principle of the universe.

Our brains developed because of this
logos-echo principle—we see it in the fact that the same areas of the brain are
used for many different perceptions. We see it in studies that show particular
cells active in certain fragmentary pattern detections. (Penfield stimulation
studies, orHubel and Weisel, 1962).
Each cell, in this view, is like a node of echo—a fragment of the hologram.
Also, Lashleys studies of cortex lesions shows a loss of detail, not loss
ofrecognition of overall patterns.
Consciousness is that literal beyond-time factor that ties all
this disparate tissue and activity together. Consciousness literally transcends
space-time, making all cells one by referring back thru time to the original
cell. Farther back in time, all life is connected by a common ancestor and is
actually one big organism. We find multiple consciousness-nodes as we travel
back. This could explain quite neatly the concept of “racial” memory, and
Jung’s “collective unconscious” too. The DNA of our brains constrains our
behavior by pain and fear—installed, and shaped by past organisms who did not
make it, or ceased to exist. It is as if the great organism of life, in moving
toward making greater flexibility within natural law from the birth of the
universe, experimented with “ideas”—learning and remembering via the DNA. It is
easy to see how this great organism of life, and really the universe too—why
stop short—has a direction and purpose evidenced by the logos echo, and our
consciousness. In life, the one driving force of evolution is toward the
greater creativity and flexibility found in higher consciousness. A greater
coherence and working unity of all things.

By using imagination, we use and
transform the past in our memories to create something new. We travel back in
time. On a larger scale, using the principle of this echo, it is easy to see
the purpose of the great organism of life in such things as the form of trees,
the heliotropism of plants, the shapes of antlers and horns, etc—as long as you
don’t get bogged down by details and press as many analogies together as you
can to glean true ultimate meaning in these distributed things of nature. They
clearly have meaning. For example—a millipede is a long organism with hundreds
of legs, and this is like the organism of life extending through time. Not just
poetic imagery, but really and truly reflecting this information in a sort of
echo of form from the future. Rupert Sheldrakes “formative causation” (1981) is
really an early apprehension of this future state creating general paths for
things in order for it to exist. The idea of Karma is similar to this, only
expanded to include things as well as people. Even rare gold running in veins
in the ground, and looking like the sun, has meaning in its looks, location,
timelessness, and rarity. Poets are really scientists of meaning. Diamonds are
symbols of higher consciousness, made of carbon, organized by intense
temperature and pressure which symbolizes the struggle of life, etc.
transformed into a translucent, unscratchable, rainbow-reflecting gem—the list
goes on. Rare events have greater value and meaning to us because we realize a
higher consciousness is reflected in them by their singularity. They were
chosen out of the field of possibility. We all desire to know this greater
consciousness deeper than anything else we do. We call it God, or truth. If we
look at things the right way, it has always been in us--literally.

The Sun is kind of the central metaphor of
higher consciousness on earth (obviously) and certainly is the source of all
energy and life. If we look at the sun as TRULY a symbol of the move towards
higher consciousness, or of reality revolving around this principle, many
hidden things become clear. Indians used to stare at the sun until they passed
out in certain of their rituals, and spoke of the “Manitou” in all things. That
Manitou is evidence of something beyond the time scales presented to us by our
limited biological consciousness—the logos echo. The myth of Icarus and
Deadalus is another example. Kings of the Earth have been frequently symbolized
by the Sun. In ancient Egyptian paintings we see a sun disk with many hands at
the ends of lines reaching down from the sun over the people depicted. This is
a symbol of the unity contained in consciousness. These people were not
stupid—they saw “magic” and meaning in these symbols. They knew a higher
consciousness was coming, and they built pyramids symbolizing this evolution
towards a higher unity. We tend to think of things more immediately in our age,
but then, they looked far into the future. Our science today helps us look back
better than any of them by far. The organism of life was working through them,
so to speak. They buried treasures in the sands of time—sent them forward in
time. Their kings were seen as “gods” on earth because the future great
consciousness (we are experiencing now in the information explosion) reached
back through the organism of life to shape what they did and saw. They
realized how much their lives were for the future—to install the portents and
monoliths of a new age to come (like in the movie “2001 a Space Odyssey”). The
people knew it too—that’s why the kings had so much power, they were
“enlightened”. The greater consciousness of the future chose the form of what
they did—they were it’s memory in a way, since all memories are really echoes
into the future consciousness. We see the same thing with the mesa-pictures of
the South American Indians—facing the sky, and the sun—displaying their works
to the future. They knew what was important, like every individual does for
their own future, as a people, as one.Having faith and hope are very important, because our biological
brains are so full of animal urges and fears and hungers from our past that
seem to want to prevent us from reaching the future—at least until we have
reached a point in our knowledge to really and truly overcome them. Denying our
“animal” nature for the sake of higher truth signals the transition from
computer/survival/building phase to the higher-consciousness phase evidenced by
our information-explosion, and our exponential advance in knowledge of recent
years. Unity of knowledge overcomes all things—that’s why God can help you
through the “valley of the shadow of death” still contained within our genes.

It seems apparent that these things were
hidden to us until we got the vocabulary and grammar right with our science. In
the Bible, Jesus said something like how can I tell you things of heaven, when
I tell you things of earth and you don’t believe? They could not comprehend it.
The great consciousness directing all life seemed to “know” that a little
knowledge is a dangerous thing—much like we put blinders on horses so they
don’t get spooked, or use covered bridges. We focused backward with science’s
isolation of variables, and our great telescopes—to keep us moving forward and
all that. This is VERY much like the idea of Frank Tiplers
“Anthropic Cosmology”—only here, I say consciousness in the future DREW
these things into being for its own existence automatically, instead of it
being a remarkable coincidence. There is a force in the universe that reaches
back and controls the unfolding of things in broad strokes, and this
time-transcending future force IS CONSCIOUSNESS. It becomes patently
obvious that religions and science are two sides to the same coin—the accurate
reading of the message written in all reality. It is all about the meaning in
things and the logos echo. If we remove the constraint of time moving forward
from our narrow biology, we see that we are more like salmon swimming upstream
towards the source of consciousness from which all things flow. Like in Julian Jaynes
book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”
(1976), Consciousness was born in life as the great body of life progressed
through the ages. We probably DID automatically follow the “voices” of gods
back then as he says—just maybe not actually heard, but motivationally. We see
it in the shapes of Buddhist Stupas, temples, and pyramids. We acquired enough
consciousness to control our own destinies to an extent, instead of acting
automatically like a hill of ants, school of fish, or flock of geese. We became
writers, and creators, of the things in our lives. We made things that
reflected what our consciousness knew outward again—made our own symbols, and
ratcheted ourselves up to higher consciousness on these. Gods in religions of
the past were these unseen controlling factors of higher consciousness, which
ultimately are aspects of God by definition—just like fingers are connected by
a palm, an arm, and ultimately a brain. Natural laws are “gods” too—to the
matter of the universe, just like certain biological processes and organs are
necessary for life. The whole idea of “false idols” being negative is getting
stuck along the way at the symbols, not progressing, etc. to realize the great
living and moving truth behind all symbols. Jordan Peterson’s (1999) book on
this process of progression to knowledge is the best I have seen
on the topic—although he does not talk about a Godlike force drawing and
creating forward as I do here, it is an excellent portrayal of the struggle
toward knowledge in life—containing uncanny parallels to a lot of my thinking.
He does acknowledge the importance of CONSCIOUSNESS to all progress—as a
force that slays the dragon and brings something new into being. But all
reality is like a big book of symbols stuck in time we must get past. Like the
Tibetan Buddhists assert—all really is illusion in this respect. B. Allan
Wallace states in his aptly named book “Choosing Reality” the yearning for
truth in combination with a wish to help others;

…implicitly
acknowledges the interdependence of self and others and the kinship of all that
lives, and is the sole motivation with which one can attain the full spiritual
awakening of a Buddha. Just as it is the supreme motivation for spiritual
practice, so is it the finest incentive for scientific research.

Religious leaders
who had “higher consciousness” were all similar in their general way of
relating to reality (see Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh
(1995), for example).

Consciousness is the ultimate meaning in
brain tissue in the same way as there is real meaning to the
universe—obviously from the time of the big bang, before time was created, in
that ultimate unity. For this same reason, our language is possible. Without
fundamental unity there is no representation across forms. Forms echo, and that
very echo is the most meaningful and tangible thing about the universe.
Consciousness is the center of meaning residing in our brains. Our particular
brain is the center of meaning in a larger consciousness. Really, the natural
laws of the universe are written in us because we arose in the universe and are
a functional part of it. A human brain is the nexus, a portal, for these
things. The natural laws are naturally apparent in our brains because the force/reflection
that molded them was this property of this universe we find in the repeating of
patterns—the logos echo. The actual birth of the universe is recapitulated in
the singular ancestral origin of life. The origin of a person in the single
cell created at conception recapitulates the phylogeny of all life in its
common origins. The developing embryo looks like various animal embryos along
the way, etc. The fact that we have single-cell organisms still with us is like
the unity still with us threaded through reality. They help sustain us and are
part of us—just as our own organs or cells are necessary for the future us.

The idea of looking in at brains and
dissecting their activity automatically creates deceptions. A brain is
something that operates with a large “beyond time” component--which by
definition is not available upon looking at brains with our here-and-now
apparatus of perception intended for another totally unrelated purpose:
survival. Another way of saying survival is to say that we maintain the theatre
of our existence. Our brains create the illusion of time moving by, and linear
causality is carved out by them from actual causality which moves everywhere at
once. Evidence for this comes from looking for a coherence, a MEANING to
things happening in our universe and our civilizations. We see the unity of the
origin of things—we see that unity spread everywhere in the stable, coherent,
properties of our world. The forms of life, the forms of civilization, and the
forms of language are woven into each other. Religions all seek to describe the
importance of conscious unity, or higher consciousness—of consciousness
in creation. Consciousness is the (opposite) mirror image of the big bang
within us. The unity in the future that pulled the universe out of the sea of
infinite possibility, and constructed it to give rise to consciousness.

We find evidence in the remarkable
coincidences that led to the exact properties of the universe needed for the
formation of life, and in the utter complexity of eyes and brains toward
greater meaning and greater levels of consciousness. Stephen Hawking quotes
Sheldon Glashow in reference to a grand unified theory—the holy grail of
physics: “When the (early) universe was very very hot, we believe that all the
forces may have been one. And that one underlying, seemingly magical force is
what we are all now working to discover” (Boslough, 1985). We find evidence of
the power and glory of consciousness in the myths of all peoples. South
American shamans speak of how “The Dream not only drives the action, it also
guides the action” (Perkins, 1994) the dream of ultimate conscious unity. The
Aborigines of Australia spoke of the “Dreamtime” when the “spirit ancestors”
dreamed the world into existence. Who knew they were so advanced? It was the future
ancestors from far after the big bang that pulled us out
of the void of infinite possibility—to put it in linear causal, or within-time
terminology. This is the function of consciousness—to construct and bind
universes. The cosmic glue that “breathes life”, and meaning, into our
equations. The soul of the machine universe. All we see and perceive is symbol
at some level. The thing that breathes life into all of it is
consciousness—which ultimately is one. The oneness gives life and meaning to
everything like some great reader reading the book of life. We are the source
of meaning when we read a book, and this great source of cosmic meaning is the
source of the meaning of everything because everything is a book to be read on
a grand scale. The logos echo is the key to this meaning.

Key to Illustrations

The SPIRAL
shape shows how the unity running through reality is seen as repeating, or meaningfully
related parallel themes. As you encompass larger sets within the spiral, you
get to a point where you see that it is actually all ONE LINE, and is truly a
unity.

PYRAMIDS are a natural progression to a
unity—towards the sky, or “future”. Actually, there are two mirror-image (in
form or meaning) pyramids describing reality—the unified origin of the physical
universe out of infinite possibility, and at the other end the unified end of
the development of life and coherence in that universe leading again to
infinite possibility.

TREE of life, and reality. Trees are excellent
symbols of the development of the universe and life—but you need to include
their heliotropism, and dependence on the Sun to read their true meaning. The
whole meaning of things is their true meaning. Life recapitulates the birth of
the universe in this way, and a single life recapitulates the birth of life. We
can “read the forms” of life and existence like a book.